Source: The Ledger, Lakeland, Fla.迷你倉沙田Aug. 09--BARTOW -- People don't have a problem finding their way home.The confusion begins when they call 911 and a stranger has to find his way to their home.That's because many home addresses and even some business addresses don't match the computerized mapping system Polk emergency officials use.They're out of sequence, on the wrong side of the road or contain fractional numbers the system can't read.Fixing these addressing errors, which affect services as critical as emergency medical assistance and as mundane as pizza delivery, falls on Polk County's 13-member Emergency 911 staff."We change or assign addresses every day," said Sally Jackson, manager of Polk's E9-1-1 Systems.It's no small task.There are 326,336 buildings in Polk County and more potential address points such as mobile home park lots and apartments, she said.The current system is an improvement over the one public safety employees did use, said Pete McNally, Polk's emergency management coordinator."We had paper maps and we updated them as often as we could," McNally said.He said it would have been worse, but at one time paramedics and firefighters operated from the same ambulance and fire station."They knew those areas pretty well," he said.But a housing boom over the past two decades in the Four Corners area and the creation of hundreds of rural and suburban subdivisions in areas all over Polk County that were once sparsely inhabited requires a better system, county officials said.PROBLEMS WITH OLD SYSTEMThe old addressing system, which was largely handled by postal employees, led to a number of problems, the officials said.There was no uniformity between postal service areas to blend addresses where postal or municipal boundaries met.No street addresses were assigned to customers using post office boxes, leaving those residents to create their own addresses.Sometimes odd-numbered and even-numbered addresses were on the same side of the street instead of being on opposite sides of the street as they're supposed to be.Addresses were assigned only to structures on main roadways but not to structures on short side roads or private roads.There was no system to standardize the naming of roads to prevent duplicated or confusing, similar-sounding road names in the same area of the county.Many mobile home parks were assigned one main street number, but there was no standardized addressing criteria for lots inside the parks.Although Polk emergency officials had been trying to put some order into the county's addressing system as long ago as 2001, the rules were not formalized until the County Commission approved an addressing ordinance in 2004.That ordinance established criteria for the street numbering system and for naming and renaming roads. It also requires street address numbers to be posted in a visible location.The ordinance required only new mobile home and RV subdivisions to adopt the new addressing criteria, but Jackson said she and her staff have tried to work with existing mobile home communities to update their addressing systems.One effort occurred in 2004 in the Cypress Lakes community north of Lakeland.Jackson said she and her staff scheduled community meetings to explain to residents what they were trying to accomplish and how it would help them."We have to go out and talk to people to accomplish this," she said.By the time that was done, 1,602 residences had new addresses."It worked out fine except for some challenges with postal delivery," said Mitch Krach, Cypress Lake's general manager, who said the main office address on U.S. 98 did not change.He said the transition involved changing the names of som迷你倉價錢 streets as well as getting the house numbers in order.Jackson, who said she'd like to work with residents in other parks, said similar efforts occurred at Indian Lake Estates east of Lake Wales and at Grenelefe near Haines City.PROBLEMS ENCOUNTEREDThe changeovers haven't been problem-free.There have been reports of problems with residents in Indian Lakes getting private delivery companies such as UPS and FedEx to accept their new addresses.Developers have complained that Jackson's office has turned into a bottleneck in getting subdivisions platted, which involves assigning addresses to lots."They have no sense of urgency," County Commissioner George Lindsey, a Lakeland builder complained.Despite the thousands of address changes her office has implemented over the years, Jackson said she doesn't recommend changing addresses unless it's necessary.In the case of the most recent change involving 203 addresses along Rifle Range Road in Wahneta, it was necessary.Jackson said the problem was brought to their attention by school officials who use the addressing database for establishing school bus routes, setting school attendance zone boundaries and even keeping track of the locations of registered sexual predators.There were three houses along Rifle Range Road that had the same address, one of which was listed as being in Alturas, another unincorporated community to the south.Although she and her staff react to reports of problems they receive from various agencies, Jackson said one staff member's full-time job is to travel around Polk County checking for problems.Jackson said Polk County makes its database available free to any other private or public userSome address changes occur suddenly and unexpectedly.That happened in 2002, two years before the addressing ordinance was approved, when Polk's Republican County Commission suddenly voted to rename a section of County Road 54 between U.S. 27 and U.S. 17-92 to Ronald Reagan Parkway."That caught us off guard," Jackson said. The decision sent them scrambling to change more than 60 addresses.But readdressing Ronald Reagan Parkway, a 6.5-mile highway that's entirely within unincorporated Polk County, was easier than other tasks Jackson's staff has taken on.In 2001, they set out to readdress U.S. 27, which stretches 48 miles from U.S. 192 to the Highlands County line.That involved dealing with addresses in unincorporated Polk County as well as with addresses in several cities from Frostproof to Davenport.And, it involved changing more than house numbers. Businesses were affected, too."We went to chambers of commerce, community groups and business owners," she said, explaining she likes to work with people as much as possible."We're very sensitive to businesses," she said, explaining the address change for them involves everything from stationery and business director advertisements to replacing large signs.Jackson said she did learn that in some cases the changes helped businesses in the long run. That's because some customers previously had trouble finding them because of the confusing array of addresses along the highway corridor.Polk's McNally said he'd like to see the same changes occur along the State Road 60 and U.S. 17 corridors, too."That would require a lot of manpower," he said.[ Tom Palmer can be reached at tom.palmer@theledger.com or 863-802-7535. Read more views on the environment at environment.blogs.theledger.com and more views on county government at county.blogs.theledger.com/. Follow on Twitter @LedgerTom. ]Copyright: ___ (c)2013 The Ledger (Lakeland, Fla.) Visit The Ledger (Lakeland, Fla.) at .theledger.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉庫
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